I could swear that I reviewed Banjo Nickaru & Western Scooches' previous album at Rambles.NET, but it is mysteriously missing from the list maintained elsewhere on this site. Possibly, I wrote about it somewhere else, or maybe it dropped into an alternate reality. In any event, here we are with their latest, as distinctive as their last though, no surprise, showing the effects of subsequent playing and performing experience, during which they have deservedly drawn a fair amount of admiring attention.

At 28 minutes, Get Us Out of Fearland falls somewhere between a long EP and a short album. One doesn't think of that particularly, however, because the music is densely packed as if the band were determined to jam as much as stuffable into every available space. Of the many ways of characterizing their sound, one that springs to mind first is "extroverted." Maybe you can't be brazen enough to call yourself a Western Scooch and then get all shy about it. They certainly don't.

So one immediately thinks of them as a 21st-century jug band, which is not really true because jug bands incorporated blues into much of their output. Blues is one genre I don't hear beyond the occasional stray note. That's sort of odd because the Scooch sound contains multitudes, encompassing a traditional Appalachian folk song, world rhythms, jazz, pop harmonies and numbers that feel like fractured 1920s novelty tunes. Their musical dexterity, essential to pulling off something as multi-layered as this, carries the listener, frequently astonished and usually smiling, along.

Everything sort of zips by as you try to keep up. Except for the oldtime "A Hundred Miles," the songs are the creations of vocalist/guitarist Betina Hershey, a woman of remarkable talents; she has also worked professionally as a dancer and singer on the musical stage. Her husband Nick Russo plays a range of stringed instruments, including -- of course -- the banjo. The couple comprise the core group, joined on Get Us Out by three players with impressive credentials in mainstream jazz and Latin jazz. One marvels at the sonic wonder of it all, and only after a few hearings does it dawn on one that two of these, one the title tune, are for all their apparent merriment serious protest songs.

I suppose the precedent is another New York City band, the Holy Modal Rounders, who confused, amused and dazzled decades ago. Still, Nickaru and his Scooches sound finally like a bunch of people but mostly like nobody else.